A round up of everything I've been doing for a month.



I scanned some paintings and put them on cafepress stuff. As well as these, there are chickens, guinea hens, nautilus, and shameran.

www.cafepress.com/natashad

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Meesto's Little Sister went to the US for a month to see the new nephew (Big Sister's new kid) and now Little Sister is back here with us. I enjoyed having Meesto all to myself for a month, but I guess I can share him some more again.

One of the things Meesto and I frequently do is read things aloud to each other. I tend to read to him while he's cooking, he reads to me while I'm doing an assortment of things. We often read news articles, blogs, assorted nonfiction economic/geopolitical analysis to each other, but sometimes we read entire fiction novels to each other. A while back Meesto read me some Walter John Williams's science fiction novels. Over the last few months I read him the first two Temeraire books, which he liked very much, but I didn't want to read the next two aloud because I find some of the plot directions in 3 and 4 very annoying. He'll have to read those himself. :p

But I read him Bujold's Shards of Honor some time ago, and while it didn't really excite him (he could never remember all the vorcharacters) I wanted to keep going to see if he'd like the later books better. So this last month I read him Barrayar, which he liked quite a bit. So now I've started The Warrior's Apprentice and now that we are several chapters in, he really likes it. As in Really Really likes it. Yay!

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I painted the toilet room green with ferns. (In NZ parlance the bathroom is a separate room, and indeed our bathroom is blue and our toilet is now green.) Is there anything finer than a squat amongst the ferns? No, I didn't think so.



Plus tui painting.

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Happy Easter! Happy autumn! For Easter we harvested our pumpkins. They came out very well. We've bought an assortment of seeds for next spring, some of which can maybe/sorta work for winter crops (radishes, mesclun salad), so we'll try that now. I've been weeding the garden. I need to do more of that.

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We've had scaffolding around our house for the last two months. The putty was falling out of our second-floor front windows and the weather was coming in. So we had people put up the scaffolding and Meesto reputtied and repainted the windows and we repainted the house--all this on one end of the house. Now the scaffolding has been moved so we can do the other end of the house.



However, when we first had the scaffolding put up, our cat jumped out a second floor window so she could explore it. Unfortunately the windows open slanty in such a way that it's possible for her to jump out onto the scaffolding, but NOT possible for her to jump back into the house- and a missed attempt would have meant a fall from a second floor window to a concrete path- not a healthy prospect for an ancient arthritic cat. When Meesto saw her out there, he freaked. I told him to shut all the windows so the cat didn't attempt anything and I'd climb up and rescue her -without getting scratched even, because I had a cunning plan. Which I did.











And she never went out on the scaffolding again.